Conveyor lane dividers are known from general practice for the purpose of dividing trays into two lanes that have been received from a one-lane feeding system by the conveyor lane divider. At the end of the conveyor lane divider, a stop element is provided for each lane in order to forward the first row with two trays to a subsequent two-lane tray sealer. A conventional conveyor lane divider of this nature is shown in FIG. 1.
The conveyor lane divider in this example has a single conveyor belt. A photoelectric barrier is provided at the beginning of the conveyor lane divider in order to count the trays that are received from the feeding system and to communicate the count to the conveyor lane divider's controller. Then the trays move along a dividing device to be placed in a designated lane. Another photoelectric barrier is mounted directly after the dividing device in order to sense the back end of a tray. The controller adjusts the dividing device such that all trays required in a lane for a format are distributed sequentially by lane, which is to say that the first trays are distributed to the first lane as a first group and then the subsequent trays are distributed to the second lane, again as a group. In order to produce a distance between the last tray of a first group and the first tray of a following group required for the changeover of the dividing device, the belt speed is briefly increased as soon as the first photoelectric barrier has sensed the back end of the last tray of a group at the beginning of the conveyor lane divider.
At restart, no trays can be located anywhere on the conveyor lane divider because the controller cannot ascertain whether trays have been removed from the conveyor lane divider during the stoppage or have additionally been placed on empty belt areas. Yet oftentimes the operator has no place to put the trays that have been removed, making it commensurately difficult to clear the machine. Initialization of the conveyor lane divider is always based on the assumption that there are “no trays inside the conveyor lane divider.” When the number of trays in a group differs from the designated number, problems and machine stoppages result in the subsequent tray sealer. Moreover, it can occur during the production process that trays are removed from the conveyor lane divider for quality assurance, which also leads to problems in the tray sealer.